Latest content: Governance and law

This report provides a summary of the findings and recommendations contained in the five regional reports Addressing the Role of Bystanders on Online Violence Against Women and Girls in the Commonwealth produced by the Secretariat in 2023.
The report presents the root causes and impacts of cyberviolence as being gender based, with a disproportionate impact on females where there is intersectionality of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, poverty, disability and other socioeconomic factors.

The Handbook on Designing and Implementing RIA Systems is intended to assist Commonwealth governments in designing and implementing programmes of Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) across multiple regulatory institutions. It identifies major risk factors that have led to failure of RIA programmes in other countries and suggests options that countries should consider to reduce the risks of failure. It is impossible to reduce risks to zero, but this Handbook will help increase the probability that RIA programmes will, in the end, improve the quality of government policies.

The purpose of A Commonwealth Guide to Case Management is to provide principled and practical guidance to the judiciary and to responsible policy-makers on justice modernisation and case management.

The objective of this Guide is to inform forward-looking best practices through a comparative analysis of member countries and to soberly align efficiency with the enduring constitutional values underlying the administration of justice.

Without a doubt, nimble, well-designed case management systems, alongside transformative technology, not only facilitate and support effective court proceedings, but also allow for the modernisation of justice.

The security and integrity of computer systems, digital data and networks have grown to be major concerns for states, organisations and people as a result of the development of the information society. Such concerns arise from the fact that malicious acts, such as ransomware, which target computer systems and their networks, have the potential to cause harm to individuals, countries and the global economy. Accordingly, many states and intergovernmental organisations across the world have taken steps to establish legal measures to criminalise and deter malicious acts that affect the integrity, confidentiality, availability and security of digital data and computer systems.

Leading competition authorities across the world have attempted in recent years to understand how companies operating within the digital space can use data to their competitive advantage and how this can distort competition and cause consumer detriment, but also how data protection laws themselves affect competition in digital markets.2 However, although the digital economy in the CSME is growing, there have been no similar attempts to understand these issues in the region.

The study approaches this issue from two perspectives. First, it provides an up-to-date overview of the international developments in this area and benchmarks the current CSME legislative framework against these international precedents. Second, the study also collects and presents baseline information on data protection and privacy in the region, to determine whether the legislative and regulatory frameworks in CSME member countries can address modern competition, consumer protection and international trade concerns.

In all countries, and at all levels of government, performance seems to lie in the eyes of the beholder. Different individuals looking at the same set of facts come to widely different conclusions. Divergent views and opinions about appropriate policies and their related programmes and projects are not only understandable, but a sine qua non of a healthy democratic system. However, divergent views about the performance of a government – implementation of policies, programmes and projects – are much harder to reconcile for lack of a fact-based consensus.

The private sector, on the other hand, does not face this problem. If a private sector company presents its financial statement and claims that it has made US$350 million profit, we accept it on its face value – not because we trust them blindly, but because those financial statements are prepared using the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). These statements, in turn, are audited by an external auditor to ensure that the statements were indeed prepared using those principles. If they do not stand up to an audit, then there are consequences, such as a loss of confidence by investors, often expressed as a sharp drop in the price of publicly traded shares.

The negative effects of climate change on nature and humankind are wide-ranging and multifaceted, and it is accepted that the most vulnerable communities, who have contributed the least to the causation of climate change, are likely to be disproportionately affected by these adverse effects. It is insufficient for only certain countries to take action to mitigate the causes of climate change; rather it is urgent that a global effort is mobilised.

The Paris Agreement, which all 56 Commonwealth member countries have ratified, commits signatories to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Signatories to the Paris Agreement are required to submit nationally determined contributions (NDC) every five years containing mitigation commitments for the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To meet these commitments, it is necessary for Commonwealth member countries to put in place carefully considered legal frameworks and policies to reduce their emissions and limit the pace of climate change.